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What is the Last Language Textbook?

The Last Language Textbook is a campaign to build freely available language instruction online. We support individual communities in building the teaching materials they need in a way that is accessible and reuseable by the wider community. Unlike traditional textbooks, the Last Language Textbook is built to share, full of multimedia, and constantly growing.

We believe everyone should have access to language instruction that works for them. That means making free materials and making it possible for everyone in the community to expand and improve those materials so we can all benefit from the expertise of our millions of language teachers and the efforts of the more than a billion language students.

How does it work?

Our curriculum is designed around a combination of online lessons and in-person language exchanges. The lessons give you grounding in the language and walk you through new interactions while the language exchanges give you a chance to practice those interactions and ask questions of teachers and other native speakers.

The lessons can be modified by the community to fit local needs, whether that means adding audio with a different accent, using pictures from the local area to illustrate lessons, or completely rebuilding the curriculum to focus on different topics. Because everything is free to share, work we do for our individual communities grows the resources available for everyone.

Who is involved?

Our current efforts are centered around the bilingual education program of PS 9, Teunis Bergen School in Brooklyn NY. Our first two fellows have built materials to help parents at the school learn to be bilingual alongside their children and the community is now operating regular language exchange meetups to practice those materials and to expand them collaboratively. This work is supported by the Wikiotics Foundation and our sponsors.

Get involved

If you have questions about participating as an individual, would like to involve your school or community, or would like to help sponsor this work, please contact us.